Roscosmos cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Korniyenko will perform a spacewalk scheduled for August. The cosmonauts will polish several windows of Zvezda service module from the outside, – Mission Control Centre representative reported.
Earlier the date extravehicular activities was shofted several times because of Proton M-27M accident since the vehicle was to deliver to the station equipment necessary for the spacewalk.
Next Progress successfully docked with the station made up for this loss.
“The spacewalk is scheduled for August 10, it is expected to start 17.14 and end at 23.48, Moscow time”, – the spokesman stated.
As Russian ISS segment flight Director Vladimir Solovyov reported earlier one of 10 tasks of this spacewalk would be to clean and polish the ISS windows. According to him this task is very interesting and important for long-duration space flights preparation since space debris and radiation affect the windows causing various scratches. Tomsk State university has already developed special gears and chemicals for space cleaning.
Besides according to MCC spokesman preliminary date of Progress M-26M cergo vehicle launched on February 17 is already fixed.
“The undocking is scheduled for August 14. Soyuz TMA-16M will be redocked taking position of Progress, while Soyuz TMA-18M to be launched on September 2 will dock with Poisk small research module taking former place of Soyuz TMA-16M” – the spokesman said.